Tectonic Shifts

Lead Analyst: Cal Braunstein

Bellwether Cisco Systems Inc.'s quarterly results beat expectations while CEO John Chambers opined global business was looking cautiously optimistic. In other system news, IBM Corp. made a series of hardware announcements, including new entry level Power Systems servers that offer better total cost of acquisition (TCA) and total cost of ownership (TCO) than comparable competitive Intel Corp. x86-based servers. Meanwhile, the new 2013 Dice Holdings Inc. Tech Salary Survey finds technology professionals enjoyed the biggest pay raise in a decade last year.

Focal Points:

• Cisco reported its fiscal second quarter revenues rose five percent to $12.1 billion versus the previous year's quarter. Net income on a GAAP basis increased 6.2 percent to $2.7 billion. The company's data center business grew 65 percent compared with the previous year, while its wireless business and service provider video offerings gained 27 and 20 percent, respectively. However, Cisco's core router and switching business did not fare as well, with the router business shrinking six percent and the switching revenues only climbing three percent. EMEA revenues shrank six percent year-over-year while the Americas and Asia Pacific climbed two and three percent, respectively. CEO Chambers warned the overall picture was mixed with parts of Europe remaining very challenging. However, he stated there are early signs of stabilization in government spending and also in probably a little bit over two thirds of Europe. While there is cautious optimism, there is little tangible evidence that Cisco has turned the corner.
• IBM's Systems and Technology Group launched a number of systems and solutions across its product lines, including new PureSystems solutions, on February 5. As part of the announcement was more affordable, more powerful Power Systems servers designed to aggressively take on Dell Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP), and Oracle Corp. The upgraded servers are based upon the POWER7+ microprocessors and have a starting price as low as $5,947 for the Power Express 710. IBM stated the 710 and 730 are competitively priced against HP's Integrity servers and Oracle's Sparc servers while the PowerLinux 7R1 and 7R2 servers are very aggressively priced to garner market share from x86 servers.
• Dice, a job search site for engineering and technology professionals, recently released its 2013 Tech Salary Survey. Amongst its key findings was that technology salaries saw the biggest year-over-year salary jump in over a decade, with the average salary increasing 5.3 percent. Additionally, 64 percent of 15,049 surveyed in late 2012 are confident they can find favorable new positions, if desired. Scot Melland, CEO of Dice Holdings, stated companies will now have to either pay to recruit or pay to retain and today, companies are doing both for IT professionals. The top reasons for changing jobs were greater compensation (67 percent), better working conditions (47 percent) and more responsibility (36 percent). David Foote, chief analyst at Foote Partners LLC, finds IT jobs have been on a "strong and sustained growth run" since February 2012. By Foote Partners' calculations, January IT employment showed its largest monthly increase in five years. Foote believes the momentum is so powerful that it is likely to continue barring a severe and deep falloff in the general economy or a catastrophic event. Based on Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data, Foote estimates a gain of 22,100 jobs in January across four IT-related job sectors, whereas the average monthly employment gains from October to December 2012 were 9,700.

RFG POV: While the global economic outlook appears a little brighter than last year, indications are it may not last. Executives will have to carefully manage spending; however, with the need to increase salaries to retain talent this year, extra caution must be undertaken in other spending areas. IT executives should consider leasing IT equipment, software and services for all new acquisitions. This will help to preserve capital while allowing IT to move forward aggressively on innovation, enhancement and transformation projects. RFG studies find 36 to 40 month hardware and software leases are optimum and can be less expensive than purchasing or financing, even over a five year period. Moreover, IBM's new entry level Power Systems servers are another game-changer. An RFG study found that the three-year TCA for similarly configured x86 systems handling the same workload as the POWER7+ systems can be up to 75 percent more expensive while the TCO of the x86 servers can be up to 65 percent more expensive. Furthermore, the cost advantage of the Power Systems could even be greater if one included the cost of development systems, application software and downtime impacts. IT executives should reevaluate its standards for platform selection based upon cost, performance, service levels and workload and not automatically assume that x86 servers are the IT processing answer to all business needs.

Trends: HPC, Programming, and Security

Lead Analyst: Cal Braunstein

Focal Points:

• IBM took back the top slot in the supercomputer rankings with the LLNL Sequoia installation, which delivered 16.32 petaflops of sustained performance running across the 1.57 million PowerPC cores inside the box during a Linpack benchmark run. Sequoia has a peak theoretical performance of 20.1 petaflops. To deliver the 16.32 petaflops IBM claims it only consumes 7.89 megawatts. The IBM supercomputer shifted the K massively parallel Sparc64-VIIIfx machine built by Fujitsu Group for the Japanese government down to number two. The Fujitsu Sparc machine had a sustained Linpack performance of 10.5 petaflops against a peak of 11.3 petaflops but it consumed 12.7 megawatts. Sequoia is 2.5 times as energy efficient as the Sparc K. IBM now has five of the top 10 high performance computing (HPC) engines. 372 of the processors, or 74.4 per cent of those on the list, are based on Intel Corp. Xeon or Itanium processors, down slightly from the 384 HPC machines on the November list. The latest Top 500 list has 58 Power-based processors, up from 49 six months ago. There are also 63 clusters based on Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s (AMD's) Opteron processors, unchanged from last year.
• According to Indeed.com companies are embracing the Web to reach customers and employees and are therefore turning to the programming languages and technology stacks made popular by companies such as Facebook Inc. and Google Inc.   Current programming languages such as C++, Java, and .NET will still be the primary languages for enterprise applications but the scripting languages will dominate the Internet. The below chart produced by Indeed.com shows the variances in job growth rates. Aside from the Internet movement another key reason for the adoption of PHP and Python is the movement to open source. Python appears to be a run-away winner because of its design elegance and framework simplicity. The next most used languages are Java and then .NET.

• Symantec released the findings of its 2011 SMB File Sharing Survey of more than 1,325 SMB organizations this week. The survey results found SMB employees are increasingly adopting unmanaged, personal-use online file sharing solutions without permission from IT. These behaviors are making organizations vulnerable to potential data losses and security threats. A Symantec executive observed that a staggering 71 percent of small businesses that suffer from a cyber attack never recover. 74 percent of respondents who adopted online file sharing did so to improve their productivity. Respondents also cited risk concerns included sharing confidential information using unapproved solutions (44 percent), malware (44 percent), loss of confidential or proprietary information (43 percent), breach of confidential information (41 percent), embarrassment or damage to brand/reputation (37 percent), and violating regulatory rules (34 percent). However, only half of the respondents stated they would go to IT for help with sharing large files while only one-third expressed interest in utilizing an already existing IT solution. 14 percent now report the average shared file size is greater than 1 GB. Additionally, more and more people are remote. The survey found that about 37 percent of SMB organizations will have employees working remotely, up from 32 percent today.